


The Maple Shrike

by Allegory



Category: X-Men - All Media Types, X-Men: First Class (Comics)
Genre: Cherik - Freeform, M/M, but otherwise serious, do people read serious books in fanfiction anymore? geez, erik's family is murdered, flashbacks to poland, meant to be digested as a novel, obviously some romance, serious plot, winter in conneticut
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-20
Updated: 2018-02-04
Packaged: 2019-03-07 04:26:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 11,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13426794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Allegory/pseuds/Allegory
Summary: Charles blinked. Or winked. They looked like the same thing, wielded the same powers. He was a goddess in disguise. That one.“Your memory is terrible, detective,” Charles remarked. “It’s a wonder you got through high school.”“I thought you flied back to London,” he said, a breath of wonder in his voice now. “Put some pants on, please. This is very strange now that it’s come back to me.”





	1. Chapter 1

Autumn was greying like a cancer patient. Her leafy hairs thinned day by day, sodden entrails smudging the pavements as people trudged on, unencumbered. Day by day the condition afflicted upon New Haven worsened until the Yalies were packing to flee the country, some to write dissertations in Nicaragua or fly home to shit in gilded toilet bowls. The leafy scent faded in Erik’s windowless flat.

Most of the day had been spent ogling a dead woman’s detached finger while her husband sobbed by the periphery of the crime scene; watching the new recruit, one Janos Quested, swiftly process the samples swept up by the forensics department. Later that day the school neighboring their HQ was flooded by song and a young girl approached him to offer a slice of her birthday cake.

He accepted the cake, but wasn’t able to recall what he’d done with it.

Time fled by in this business. Erik whittled the time by diving back to the cold cases, people who’d been missing for months now with no new leads. He checked the Twitter page for tips, phoned some families, failing more than not to pick up anything concrete. It was easy to get lost in the motions, to swim with the tide until time faded into a nonentity.

Someone rapped their knuckles hard against his door. “Time to clock out.”

His own knuckles jumped like ticks against his rosewood desk. Erik jumped off of it, threw his suitcase over his shoulder and exited the room. The whole office had been evacuated of life. The only sign of it was in the frosted door swinging hauntingly in his face.

His cellphone vibrated in his coat pocket: _we’ve got something you might want to see._

*

East Rock Park, the yellow-black police tape, sunset spilling over the haphazard maze of them. Officers and labbies scuttled around the area like late invitees to a barbeque. Erik had grown up watching ducks kick through the murky green waters, picking crumbs he threw at the shore. Took his two girls here, kissed them each on their cheeks, felt his hoeey lump of a heart swell when Wand tickled him to the ground. Same tree, same hills, clouds like cotton candy spun in the sky.

Everything was the same.

He got out and there he was, Officer Janos Quested, leaning against a tree bark some distance from the scene. Erik sidled up to him and the man nodded at the corpse splayed before them.

“Young one,” he said, as if a smaller body made the case more somber somehow. Quested was just as much of a kid in this game, fresh out of the academy, his face a tad too handsome for the job. It was the kind of face Erik always saw on victims, and recruits. Smart, but not smart enough to make it to college; parents or uncles or some other relatives mentioned the police force and then here they were, sorry kids riding on the delusion of a stable, well-paying career.

Erik bent under the tape _._ There was always war on the streets, everywhere in America, Poland too. He sucked in a breath at the sight. He let his eyelids flutter for a moment to rinse his memory and ground him to the moment. 5 th January. A little over a year. This was happening now.

“Lehnsherr, good to have you here. On time.”

“Save it, assistant head.”

Lieutenant Nur was an asshole, but more passively so than Grey. And he was head now, at least temporarily.

The labbies were going in and out, sealing swabs in plastic bags. Erik caught a whiff of cigarette smoke in the air. When Nur understood why Erik was tilting his head, he stomped away, voice rising above the noise of flashing cameras and punctuated mutterings.

Erik stepped closer to the corpse. The boy couldn’t have been more than five years old, eyes glazed over, dried blood on his lips. The sweater he’d been wearing had been pulled off of him and thrown some distance away, a scrunched mass of pink with a blood red blotch over it. A star had been carved into the boy’s heart and a maple leaf laid on top of it. There was a pillow under his head, feathers sprouting out of it.

The Maple Bird again.

Too much, not enough. The memories accosted him: skinny winter on a Sunday morning, thawing ice, vapor trickling together on the inside of a glass kettle. It shone with a friendly blue light, but it was never very smart to trust in these things, the good things, because life had a way of ripping them away. The inkling came when Erik had drawn a line on the pad with his fountain pen, pre-dipped, and came away with nothing but a scratching sound. Door slamming, the stabbing pain in his knees when he stumbled and the frost bit into his skin. He had his fucking boxers on; their blood got all over his legs and seeped under his skin for weeks, mingling with his own.

“Officer?” Quested’s voice, closer now.

Erik had to step away. _Scratch scratch scratch._ A million birds chirping and guzzling, parrots and parakeets, which one? A leaf. Maple. The air was stained with the iron tinge of blood, anchovy-sweat and a sweetness he couldn’t distinguish.

“Yeah. A moment, please.”

Blood thudded in his ears. The sun fell away. Some office workers had emerged from their cubicles nearby, eyes fixed curiously on the scene. Pictures were snapped and Erik felt a lot like a celebrity then, in particular the ones who yell at their fans to fuck off when they ask for autographs. By the time Erik turned back, most of the officers had gone home. The body was still there, a black mound under the shade of a tree. His face had fallen away as dusk crept over them.

“You’re not allowed. You’ll fuck up the body.”

Nur was fending him back with one arm. Erik pushed against him, but the man was stocky and more powerful than he looked.

Erik stared at him. The silence spoke all his words, the ones that curled in the darkest recesses of his mind. The ones that would get him dishonorably discharged if he were to give them auditory manifestation. So the staring continued for what might’ve been hours, but Erik knew this game. He could play it very well indeed.

And at last, the slight furrow in Nur’s brow, the breath that slipped out between his lips. The truth was that they’d done most of the sampling and the body would be sacked by the end of the day anyway. Better this than have Erik tearing through the morgue.

“Hurry up, then. Don’t mess anything up.”

Erik crouched down next to the body and closed his eyes, saw how the killer went into this. It had to be someone the kid trusted. The park was always packed during Saturdays. People would be getting on with their own lives, oblivious of the slights around them. It would’ve been easy to bring the boy along, stab him and walk away, wholly anonymous.

He had a charming face. Freckled, like Wand, but he was sickly plump in a way that suggested canned sardine on bread for dinner. Erik pried his lips open and noted the mess of his dentition. He would’ve been the sort of kid who never spoke in class, the one bullies picked on, sneered at. These types usually killed themselves.

“Missing Persons?”

“None matching.”

Nur shuffled his feet next to Erik, the incessant noise of leather squeaking strangely comforting this time.

“I can put someone else in charge of this one.”

 _Someone else,_ Erik laughed. Grey was out and John was dead and he had the fantasy of putting Maple into _someone else’s_ hands. Erik’s fist throbbed and Nur, however incorrigible, sensed it. He curled his own hands. Erik stood up.

“Stay the fuck out of this,” he said.

 _You have to let go. It wasn’t your fault, Erik._ Mrs. Moira’s voice was echoing vacantly in his mind, a ghost from another past.

Something was returning to him, the man prisoners crapped themselves over in interrogation, the rolled sleeves and broken skin and vicious snarl. The man inside him, the one he’d set aside.

Maple wanted him, the beast, the anger, and Erik would give it to them.


	2. 2

Winter had started abruptly while he was immersed in the ministrations of his head that day; a draft of snow curled his way as he trudged across the carpark. The one lamppost above his car, at the furthest end of the compound, flickered on and off ceaselessly. The light pouring down his cheeks turned his face sallow.

A wave of recognition washed over him: the overpowering realization that he was so _weathered,_ dreary wrinkles above his forehead, the various dents in his face. A carton of milk, maybe, that had been run over a multitude of times, worn and fully disposable. Old? Not old. But things had changed with him. He looked around the empty darkness around him, felt all of it sink in his bones.  He could die today, tomorrow, and New Haven wouldn’t bat an eyelid about it.

Erik knew he was long past his days; that when a detective started thinking about things like these, it was during their sixties, a time to live on retirement budget and attempt to forget a life of gore and death. It wasn’t a matter of finance that tethered him to his job, but this one was all he had. All he was.

Arms crossed on the steering wheel, he sighed, gave the Star of David hanging from his front seat mirror a tentative glance. It was all but faded in the darkness. With a deep sigh he got out of the car and heaved the body-bag in the passenger seat over his shoulder. LAUNDROMAT flickered in a cold, artificial light above him.

The autopsy reports would be in at top speed, hopefully early that morning. Erik had spent the whole day sifting through files, connecting notes from the recent murder to the one long ago, trying to dig up connections. He’d been there until he was cross-eyed for no good reason.

Clothes in, mind out. Time ticked by in the hollow corridor as the snow drafted and squalled, a creature of its own. Erik’s eyelids fluttered. The washing machine spun in never-ending circles.

_Beep._

His watch? His phone? A coffee grinder?

He paused at that last thought (stumbled, not paused. To pause wielded a far greater connotation of alertness than he could muster at the glorious hour). Laundromats didn’t boast coffee makers. Sometimes the nice lady who worked or resided or hovered in this tiny square at the end of the block would emerge to offer him a box of complementary fabric softener as if it wasn’t commercial bullshit. Anti-static? Who the fuck in this economy was paying for that scam?

Unpleasant thoughts in an unpleasant mind. Erik indulged in them as his eyes rolled to the back of his head. The crisp white light from the ceiling pierced his vision, dark and bright at the same time.

War and Peace. There was a woman who held that book in her hands. When Erik first saw it in his greasy overalls at Gil’s repair shop, he had squinted, caught a _Tolkien_ or _Tolsoi_ or something, and then his eyes had wandered up the woman’s star-freckled arm, her unassuming visage tucked into a shadowy corner, and seen her nose, her crooked nose like an eagle that had crash landed and would never pick on more than lentils ever again.

It looked good on her: the despondency, the fat pages of a book Erik’s eyes would merely glance off of. She wasn’t beautiful, wasn’t ugly. She was just something different, a new curiosity in his daily scrap and tinker of metals.

“Excuse me.”

Erik’s head was tilted back against the wall. There were six more seats in his row; he was unable to find reason in the British voice’s request. He remained silent.

Mr. British plopped down next to him, the hem of his shirt or coat brushing Erik’s thigh.

“It’s awfully cold out. Let’s grab a cup?”

Erik heaves like he’s got the five oceans filling his lungs. Atlantic was salty this time of the year according to NAT GEO. It always seemed to be playing on his contraption of a TV when he got home.

“It seems we’ve both got five minutes till our clothes dry. Starbucks is just around the corner.”

Erik sucked a breath in through his teeth. He had eyebrows that could cut diamonds and some rather lovely locks too, salt-tinged from the blasting air and torrents of snow and matted well to his head, but they framed him like the Mona Lisa. Or The Scream. Erik remembered sitting in class in high school and thinking that they looked exactly the same, just that one version was painted drunk.

“Not interested,” Erik said. Nothing came out of his mouth first, so like a clogged up chimney he coughed out the soot and adjusted the crumply tie around his neck. It felt like a noose most days, which was as good a reason as any for Erik to keep it there.

Brit sat straight, back peeled off the wall. He smiled at Erik. Surely it was meant to be bitter and pouty—he had the sort of mouth shaped perfectly for it—but Erik saw something else beyond the teasing, some general good will he got from most people in Walmart when he wheeled his cart around with his badge and uniform.

“It’ll be good, officer. My treat to thank you for taking care of CT.”

“I don’t need thanks.” CT was one of the easier places anyway. He’d just been transferred here at the wrong time. Or right. All very subjective.

But Brit stood up and leaned against Erik’s washing machine so, being veiled beneath Brit’s thick coat, Erik couldn’t see the his clothes swirling inside. Erik cupped his face in his hands, mangled pink sleeves and dried blood lining his eyes.

“All right. Five minutes.”

Brit’s entire face lit up like it was Christmas again, that damned holiday where Erik refused to leave the house unless Magda pretended to be sick. Then he’d do the groceries and cook. Most days it smelled of burnt toast and it became something of tradition that they’d have a mini crackpot celebration of their own at home.

Erik lifted the huge body-bag from the floor to the nearby table. Washing clothes was the only habit he still retained from the “past”, one divided by a fine line. What happened before, and what was happening now. Spinning clothes grounded him.

Erik took another look at the Brit. Boyish cheeks and a gash across his mouth, vibrant red lips that seemed impossible in the harsh blue and white December winter. He looked like one of the boys who went to Yale, but why Yale when there was Oxford back home? He must’ve been sucking on chopped chili for the past four hours. There was too much in the smoothed-out lapels and the voluptuous visage of his upper lip for Erik to handle looking at properly.

“How curious,” was all Brit said. Then he put his hand out, friendly and terrifyingly American. “The name is Charles. And you are?”

The only other Brit whom Erik knew was in a grave, dead on the day before her court case. Her last words had been “For the queen of England,” and Erik heard it every night he went to sleep for months to come. It was good he didn’t sleep much.

“Trying to do my laundry,” Erik looked at the washing machine. Just over three minutes. “Or at least I was.”

Erik left him behind, but Charles rushed to his side like an eager pup. He could’ve been thirty-two or twenty-three. Somehow Erik knew he’d be wrong if he guessed.

“I know who you are, detective,” Charles said outside the laundromat, wind howling behind them. Across the street there was a seven-eleven sign erected next to a dead tree. “I’ve heard many great things about you.”

Erik felt strangely like this was a good moment to slip a cigarette between his lips, but he’d quit decades ago and had never had the urge since. Everything was slightly off now, canted to one side, displaced by an inch or two.

They started walking. Erik had his hands rammed deep in his pockets to ward off the cold. Charles had his out, gloveless. They were painfully cold to glance at, on the verge of frostbite with the brittle nails, but he seemed to like them that way. Just like Wanda, who took after his mother and after the unforgiving landscape of Poland.

Unforgiving? Flashes of running his hand through her hair while the two were crouched behind bushes, watching the bison move languidly across the grass. One time she walked up to them and they eyed her, all eight of those massive creatures, whiffing against the soil. Waiting.

“So you live around here?”

“No. I live in Middletown and drove two hours to this destitute shithole just for the laundromat.”

“In my humble opinion, New Haven has been one of the better places, though. You should see Hartford.”

“I used to handle cases there.”

Charles laughed. It sounded necessary, like someone had given Erik a much needed scratch on an itchy patch between his toes. But that was what happened with itches: they went away and came back twice as urgent, and suddenly you would’ve gained a dependence on your scratcher, a little like the junkies down at central.

Erik wasn’t in narcotics. It wasn’t his job to deal with the junkies so he liked to spend his mornings at the park there, eating artificially-colored crabsticks and mustard-drenched hot dogs that were buying him a direct ticket to testicular cancer. It felt like ages ago, though it was just last week he’d been watching a young girl dig around for a stash. Brown poodles barking. The man who jogged in circles as the sun draped over him, spilling over his shoulders, mingling with his sweat.

And it was clicking now—Charles, the park, a distinct memory of their eyes locking that first time, the recognition that something was different about this man in a way Erik couldn’t pinpoint. It irked him, nagged at his brain, but the cases afterwards placated him. They always did.

“Ah,” Charles said. “It’s clicked, hasn’t it?”

They were standing under the streetlight now, and the way a dimple formed on Charles’s left cheek made Erik want to slap him. He had a face that asked to be hit. Erik caught himself, thought that his work was getting to him, and smoothed the crease between his own brows.

Charles pushed the door open, turning so Erik couldn’t see his expression. He ordered a flat white, lactose-free, a dash of cinnamon and _get rid of the foam please, thank you._ Erik watched him, a little stumped, no more lavish with the hard planes of his face than the barista who was punching shit in the register, exhausted and eager for the night to end.

Erik proceeded with half a shot of café latte (basically milk) and the gambit began. Two men one bill. Charles paid. He had the good-natured kind of face that looked like it was born to pay anyway. Erik said nothing, though he knew he’d feel foolish about it later.

There was only one lone figure curled on a couch, laptop screen casting a supernatural glow on their face. Erik checked his watch, saw that he’d be running late today (yesterday? Tomorrow? Time had broken the fifth wall long ago) and for once felt like he couldn’t give an ass about it.

“You know what?” Charles asked when he passed Erik his drink. Erik didn’t hold it by the sleeve.  He knew what. Had seen it in his eyes, the pretty brown hair, furtive licks of his lips.

They went back, got their clothes packed up and then for once in the past five years someone who didn’t wear the uniform was seated in Erik’s car. Erik drove them to his flat, the derelict one near HQ that the owner had been fighting a lawsuit over, and when he switched off the engine and got out of his car Charles kissed him on his cheek to be sure the man wasn’t dumb.

“Yeah, I know. Just for the night.”

And so he had someone in his room now, a man no less who striped his coat off and hung it over the television where it glared at Erik, almost indignant. Erik peeled his clothes off and threw on some casuals, drugged into a hypnotic cloud of sleep by the milk, the soft, flexuous milk. _I’ll think about this in the morning,_ he thought, even though his alarm clock was showing 4.04am already.

“You can’t stay forever,” Erik mumbled for the sake of having something to mumble, because now Charles was pressing up against him and he didn’t look anything like a woman, to be sure, but the red lips tricked him into thinking about Mags. She’d be fine with this. It was Jewish spirit to be kind, or something.

“Mm,” Charles purred. “Thank you. It’s hard to find good company nowadays.”

“You stink.”

Charles leaned into him with that quirky smile on his lips, his red lips _scorching._ If he kept smiling like that the sun was going to explode from sheer shame. “I’m afraid I’m too tired now, to shower, even if you were to run the heater for me.”

Erik’s nose had been assailed by everything from maggot-ringed bodies by lakesides to festering bodies in elevators. Nothing smelled like anything anymore. Stinking was just a fact, an observation, the way one would look at the word _toothbrush_ on a grocery list and go to the aisle for it. Was there an aisle to politely decline a stranger crawling into his bed? Perhaps, but Erik hadn’t seen it before.

“I trust you not to nick.”

Charles’s laundry haul comprised of clean cashmeres and corduroys that weren’t appropriate for spinning. He also had a Rolex around the bony taper of his wrist, but that could be a cheap imitation, only that it wasn’t.

There were not a great many things to nick in the tiny room anyway besides the square TV, copies of crime files and foul socks kicked under the bed. Charles belonged somewhere with teapots and porcelain busts, but he slept like a baby anyway in the ruddy flat.

Erik did too. Though sleep was a loose word, and he felt more like he’d been floating above his mattress for the single hour before work. The sheets were moving under him. Charles had slipped his hand under his waistband and was tugging himself lazily beneath the sheets. Erik didn’t know what happened. He didn’t want to, and when the alarm went off he sat up to the pretty boy next to him fast asleep, his cheeks just a little flushed.

Supposedly there was something in Erik’s lazy pit bull eyes or brisk manners that was very attractive. Erik got up, threw his shirt on and called Quested because calling a stranger was decidedly better than calling Nur. He stared at the pockmarked wall as they talked.

“News?”

“No.” His voice was primed, devoid of sleep. Newbies were always like that. They wasted energy when it wasn’t needed only to be out-of-commission when it was. “Nothing new. I’ve been talking to Mortimer and he’s processing the body as quickly as he can. Says what he’s got now is a 3D render of the blade. Sent you a copy of the file.”

“Good. See you in.”

Erik got his laptop running while he had a cup of coffee, then two more shots when that wasn’t enough. The knife was general, an unimpressive clay mold, but there was the estimated length of it and the depth of the incision that he burned to the back of his mind.

Charles shifted behind him. Erik had packed his case by the time Charles was awake, hands stretched over his head. Whatever he’d been doing under the sheets last night, he clearly didn’t think Erik was aware.

The message got across anyway. Charles was a sight there, wooly sweater slipping off a shoulder, his hair a tossed-up mess. There were those doll eyes, his cupid lip’s slightly parted to say something, but neither of them had figured out what.

“Listen,” Erik said. “You leave when you’re ready. That could be this morning or afternoon—no later. I’m not gay. I have—“

 _Had past relationships with women?_ He puzzled over what he could say that was true and sounded right to himself. He glanced at his left hand, the ring that used to adorn his fourth finger. Days when he used to wonder how he’d ever been alive without it, the accumulation of his life honed into that one throwaway job he did for a place to sleep in the Polish countryside. _Bzzt._ Oil-slicked fingers. _You’ve grease on your forehead, Kochanie._

“No, you’re not,” Charles smiled, gently this time, like he saw through the hardness in Erik’s eyes and was trying not to hurt his inflamed heart. “But you’ll call me, won’t you.”

And it wasn’t a question. Maybe Charles had laid it all out, every connotation from the way he said that _excuse me_ to the half-hearted masturbation and Erik was just too absorbed and tired to think about it all.

He wound himself back. Put the recent murder to the back of his head, and studied Charles with a clear head. Wealthy, a fox’s way with words, a proposition of some sort then. The night felt like a test Erik had written without knowing. He got the impression that Charles had been following him around for a bit and shivered at the thought. The best stalkers blended in.

“If that’s what it takes to get you to leave.”

Charles crawled out of the bed, naked from the navel down. Erik wasn’t sure where to put his eyes at first. They slipped away in every uncomfortable direction away from his crotch. Then Charles was in front of him. He took Erik’s hand in his and placed it on the left side of his belly. Charles sucked in a tedious breath when Erik continued to stare blankly at him.

“You don’t remember at all?”

And there it was, the trick of light, Charles stepping back for it all to come together. There was a small scar on his side where he’d put Erik’s palm that could’ve easily been mistaken for a birthmark. A bullet wound, miraculously superficial.

“Professor?”

Charles blinked. Or winked. They looked like the same thing, wielded the same powers. He was a goddess in disguise. _That_ one.

“Your memory is terrible, detective,” Charles remarked. “It’s a wonder you got through high school.”

Erik didn’t get through high school, more because he had to work to help his parents than anything to do with his memory, but that was beside the point. “I thought you flied back to London,” he said, a breath of wonder in his voice now. “Put some pants on, please. This is very strange now that it’s come back to me.”

Charles took the towel that Erik had tossed on the bed a while ago. He draped it reluctantly over his crotch. “I did go home, but not for long. It was a surprise to see you here, even more so at a laundromat. I assume from the state of your living condition that you’re a single man now.”

“I’ve always been a single man,” Erik said, after he cleared his throat. It was in the sense which he heard it, singular in effort, singular in dedication to his work. Those things hadn’t changed about him. “And you’ve always been gay, then?” he added, lacking something better to put him on equal footing with Charles. “America’s the right place to do it anyway.”

“Mm, but I came back for you specifically. Had you not pushed me out of the way, I might’ve been paralyzed hip down.”

“You can thank me by letting me go to work, then.”

“Of course, detective. But I would really like to meet up again. So you _will_ call me, yes?”

It wouldn’t be the other way round because Erik had his contact number in his file—information he lawfully shouldn’t access. But the law was just words on paper anyway, and it wouldn’t be the first time he’s dug through old cases to solve new ones. This was a personal case though, and Erik wasn’t even sure if he wanted to solve it.

“Sure. Now if you’ll excuse me—“ Erik took his suitcase, knuckles whitening around the handle.

“Not even a moment to catch up? My, this crass culture is scarce one I’ll ever get used to.” Charles tilted his head playfully aside. “Farewell, Erik.”

He was at the doorway by then, reminiscing the case that had involved one Charles Frances Xavier, the genetics professor he had so desperately gone to when the other forensics were slogging through the pile of dead bodies, dragging the days out until the case was sure to go cold. He’d saved Loren because of him and she was in Prague now, like all the other women in his life who knew that being around Erik meant underground networks and backhanded deals, people thirsting for revenge. It was better this way.

But Charles, he enjoyed it—fire burned in him for the danger. Adrenaline junkies and workaholics, both of them. An endless slough of obsessions and addictions.

Erik stopped at the door, one hand in his pocket. The day was much colder in the morning. He let it settle in his bones.

“Goodbye, old friend.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm looking for betas please! I have 10k written out but I'm not willing to post it until I go back and edit them, which is taking a lot of time....please contact me if you'd like to edit/beta this fic! I can be contacted here or by Tumblr: enzelx.tumblr.com
> 
> Thanks!


	3. 3

“I want this one.”

Raven Darkholme, Charles’s adoptive sister, exquisite in the gold hemmed dress.

They were in one of the more popular parts of town now, a few hours down from Erik’s flat via a limousine had seen Charles dressed in fresh clothes (fabric softened), the minty perfume of Silicone Valley CEOs exuding from his form. There Raven had run up to him and kissed him on the cheek: two days of flying after, Charles was seeing her for the first time in three years, wondering why he hadn’t visited sooner.

Charles looked up from The Death of Ivan Ilyich to regard her. Hours of shopping had whittled him down to his basal needs, which were books and warm hands. Admittedly it hadn’t been a great idea going around Conneticut on his own, trying to remember every street and landmark the way it’d been when he was working as a lecturer here on a brief work exchange program.

Things changed quickly. The old Da Vinci Club that used to play Rolling Stones and other old music that made him purr had become a marked-down antique store. Detective Erik Lehnsherr, who he’d last seen at a cozy bungalow at the edge of town (alone? With family? He never found out, but only assumed from his ring) had drifted into that horrendous rat hole of a flat. Life never seemed quite so finicky back home, in the English countryside, but this wasn’t an omniscient opinion. At least East Rock Park hadn’t changed much at all.

“No, Raven. It’s too gaudy, I think, for the occasion. Try the blue one over there—no, not that, the backless one.”

She returned to the changing room and emerged again. After a moment of spinning in front of the mirror, Raven nodded thoughtfully at Charles. “Yeah. You’re always right when it comes to dresses.”

Charles buried his face in his book and grinned to himself. Being around her lifted his spirits, especially when after the purchase she took him to _Library Café_ just next door. Raven wasn’t one to spend more time or money than was necessary in affairs of appearance, and it had been Charles’s suggestion in the first place when she mentioned an upcoming charity gala.

The money was Xavier’s, the face was Raven’s. She skirted around people and politics the way Charles’s mother had taught her, knowing perhaps from Charles’s blocky childhood, swathed in blankets and chess pieces and Rubik cubes that he wasn’t going to go anywhere pass basic table manners. Raven, ever eager to please, to learn, to be the ambassador, though—she learned the foundation, turned ideas into events with concrete dates and times and Charles had always watched in awe, wide rim glasses askew on the bridge of his nose.

It didn’t help that he had a possessive streak towards his mother. It did that they both enjoyed books. While Raven ordered for the both of them, Charles got up and sifted through the books on the nearest shelf. He ran his fingers across their spines, always with a gentle flutter in his heart. The café had an ethereal visage to it, shelves so high they raced towards the vaulted ceiling. Each shelf had a different subject carved into it, from Science to Politics, Fiction to Military. Ladders were propped up next to the cash register for employee use and buzzers had been placed on each table should one wish to sift that far up. At the time only they and an aged woman occupied the store, but it wouldn’t be long.

“Can I get the newspaper, please?” Raven called out to the ponytail waiter just as Charles set down two books on molecular biology on his side and one on nuclear physics next to Raven’s tea set. Raven turned the book around and raised a condescending brow, which wasn’t truly her fault. Everything about her face was shaped in a way that put her in parliament (she _had_ been there for a stint).

“Mark Fox? You know I’ve read them at Dundee.”

The mere mention of Dundee gave her glassy eyes. Raven touched the ankh cross on her neck, an act driven by habit. She’d completed her degree and found her first love there, one Ororo Munroe who had dressed up in a silly kilt and kissed her wholeheartedly under a rainbow flag.

“Never hurts as a refresher,” Charles said genially as he flipped open one of his own books. His eyes widened in wonder. “Oh look, it quotes my thesis…”

Raven rolled her eyes. “Yes, Professor Xavier, like you didn’t totally know that.”

They both tossed their heads back in laughter. Brother and sister reunited.

The waitress came by a few minutes later with the requested newspaper and lunch. Club sandwich special for the lady and something more concrete for Charles, who dug fervently into the gloriously meatball-mounted spaghetti. There was an art to looking good while eating, one which Charles never did pay enough attention to. In the end hunger was hunger and he was _rather famished,_ as one might say back home.

“Oh dear,” Raven murmured. She turned the paper around and slid it over to Charles, who’d set the books instead of his napkin on his lap.

MAPLE SHRIKE STRIKES AGAIN.

5 YEAR OLD KILLED AT EAST ROCK PARK.

Charles read the article to the very last line.

“It’s a lot more genial this time,” Raven remarked.

She wasn’t wrong. The kid hadn’t been impaled on a tree or anything of the sort. But the trademark maple was there, dry and crinkled around the edges. The kid’s face had been blurred out.

In another photograph two detectives stood by a tree, one with an arm on his hip and the other smoking, fleeting clouds of grey just visible. Neither of them were Erik to be sure, but it made Charles wonder if he was there. No, _of course_ he was there. It explained the laundromat and his grave sobriety, the wakefulness that followed him to the last minute before he closed his eyes.

When a detective got too caught up in their work, it was an innate kind of weakness that made them bad at the job. Empathy could drive them so far in the pursuit of justice, pure white justice, that they couldn’t see its nonexistence. Charles had known from the start that this was what constituted Lehnsherr, who’d never be a great or brilliant man. But he was a good one, and that was what Charles liked about him.

“The world’s a bloody mess now,” Charles sighed and dabbed the bottom of his lip with the napkin. Raven sat back on her couch, chewing slowly with her eyes closed.

“I miss home,” she said, when the first gulp was done and she washed it down with a cup of Jasmine. “Things are normal there. Murders with Tetrodotoxin, .22LRs. None of this maple rubbish.”

Charles cleaned his reading glasses, clouded by the steam of his meal. The tip of his tongue stuck out just slightly as he went over the lenses.  “And that’s what defines us, sister. Your penchant for peace, and mine for…”

“Adventure?” Raven offered, raising her cup of tea.

Charles smiled and clinked his against hers.

“Euphemistic, but good enough.”


	4. Chapter 4

And this was the grave issue: Erik Lehnsherr was a liar.

Police officers weren’t supposed to lie. They were supposed to look grim when they approached families and say in stony voices, _Sir, we’re sorry for your loss,_ and genuinely mean it. They were supposed to have their chests punched out when the press ran around demanding the news on a case that had turned into wildfire, media fodder. They ought to have a high school graduation certificate too.

Erik Lehnsherr exhibited none of the prerequisites of being a good detective. He did possess, however, a leather jacket that fit him quite well, and a look on his face that was not kind or intimidating or anything at all—the blankness of it, the lack of humanity, that was what made people clear their throats, tuck their hair behind their ears, scuttle back to the darkened corners from whence they came.

He used to think the cigarettes made him scarier, but it actually got him into Hollywood’s TOP 10 HOTTEST DETECTIVES (why the fuck such a rating existed was anyone’s guess). It played a minor role in him quitting; mostly it was the way Mags plucked the tobacco out of his fingers and kissed him on the lips. _No more of this if you smell like a sewer,_ and Erik had obliged like an eager dog.

That was what women did to him, Erik supposed. Except Grey. And Charles.

Charles?

The red bull was getting to him. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten something, and in assent his stomach growled, gnawing into itself. Erik got off his desk, stabbed a pin into his corkboard and went to Dunkin Donuts next door to buy himself a half dozen croquettes. He shoved them down systematically. The level of enjoyment was about the same as what he experienced by doing laundry.

The issue was also that Erik had uncharted thoughts in his head. Not about the cases, because the analytical part of him had been sapped dry by the Maple Killer business he’d been poring through the whole morning. And they had a lead in any case: the kid’s name, one Andy Shaw, tipped by neighbors of the boy when the newspaper landed on their porches earlier. Erik had enquired deeper and gotten an address on the Shaw estate, and he’d be heading there once Nur decided to show up. Law enforcement had beaten some order into him. Also, he was one dot off from being suspended.

So the thoughts, the strange ones, were about the professor. The day before he was supposed to board a plane; the lingering touch on Erik’s jaw, spikes of gingery facial hair yielding under his fingers. When he got home, it was to the furrowed worry between Mags’s brows. _You have that disturbed look on you._ It was disturbing; Charles was, the way he made Erik forget everything about himself, the molecules of his body dissipating until it was just the red mouth, the pearly flash of his nape, synapse and sinew.

Erik got his cellphone out and dialed to D.I. Grey. It rang for a solid minute before falling off, and took Erik two more tries before Jean finally picked up.

“What’s cricket flour?”

Erik paused. Contemplated the question.

“Is it necessary that I answer this to talk about a case?”

“No. If you knew the answer you would’ve said it anyway.” There was some rustling at the end of the line—things being thrown into a shopping cart, which was a wholly novel image to attach to Jean. She didn’t have the sort of family face that warranted grocery shopping, or a face that warranted anything besides locking people behind bars. “They’re supposed to be sustainable according to the package. See, you need to know these things, Lehnsherr. One day some hooligan will use it to wipe off blood stains, and then where will you be?”

 _At a retirement home,_ Erik thought grimly. He knew he was kidding himself, though. The job would sooner kill him than see him at peace with the world.

“Maple is back,” he said. A woman who worked in sexual assault passed by, carrying a Strawberry Frosted to the table next to his.

The news gave even Jean a pause. She imposed a strict regulation against herself to not watch or read the news during vacations—the one time she did, she’d rushed back after just a few hours in Nicaragua.

“Well,” she said after a long silence. Cash registers were beeping on her end of the line and some kid was screaming, _daddy, I want that one!_ And then for some reason Erik was thinking about his own dad, or rather his absence for a large part of his adolescence. They had a low table set on the balcony where he slept most days. Lines of cocaine, lampposts flickering yellow in the black, black pupils of his eyes.

“We’ve got a suspect. I’ll keep you updated on things.”

“Erik.”

And then winter was coming back in full force, a squall of snow tearing at his face. Rooms that housed cockroaches in Poland; Erik curled up among them, speckles of black in his eyes, waiting for _something._

Jean was there. She’d pulled him onto his two feet, placed her thumbs over his temple and made him focus. _Erik, Erik, look at me._ Blood under her fingernails. But Erik hadn’t let anyone touch the bodies.

It was cold outside. Erik was suddenly aware of this fact yet again. He glanced at his watch, 1.30p.m., and remembered it was January. A little over a year.

“Yeah, I know.” And then he hung up.

*

Nur got Erik to take Quested with him.

It was a feat in itself. Erik hadn’t worked with anyone since John got killed on duty. The narc game was analogous to having your toes in quick sand—John’s feelers were attuned to it, could sense that he was getting sucked in too deep when he asked for the department change. Too little too late.

Erik didn’t know him that well but he’d liked the guy in spite of his nail biting habits—and that was no small accomplishment for him. But they found his body on the shores so long ago, years before Maple, before the winter that had split his life into two. All Erik had when John’s name cropped up in conversations was a numb splinter in his chest, a vague recognition that he was a good man in the way that all dead men were.

There were two kinds of people in this world, the big CEOs who slapped Armani-scented business cards on everyone’s faces and the ones whose cards were slipped under tables, dog-eared and creased, like relics from an ancient civilization. The Shaw residence was nestled in a neighborhood that was wealthily silent, a collage of people who had enough money that they didn’t need to interact with society to survive. The problem was that the quiet ones always had something to hide.

Quested drove. Erik had one hand out of the window, a habit from smoking that he was conscious of but committed anyway. If he was going to bring the newbie around, he’d at least take a moment to rest his eyes.

There was something sweet in the air that Erik couldn’t discern. The body came back to him, a fresh puzzle piece. The maple, carnage, feet crunching on the malaise condition of mankind. Autumn was passing or he was passing autumn. The world was always a frozen winter landscape, but his heart, it was with the rotten apples and soggy milk cartons of gilded brown sunsets. It was autumn in Poland when they first met, and it was autumn in America when she left.

“Mr. Lehnsherr?”

Erik was looking at his phone now, Charles’s number saved in it. There was a triple six at the end of the number—an unaccountably professorial thing to do.

Quested had parked outside of the Shaw mansion. It loomed over the other buildings, though in a smart way that utilized the pine trees instead of bricks. It wasn’t hard to imagine that a beach and sea stretched out from the backyard and that the Shaws would ride a yacht to Cuba in the summer, a perfectly white family, mom, dad, Andrew and Jennifer. No, the fluted French pillars were screaming Henry and Seraphina.

“The Sultan’s brother has a yacht with two speedboats: Nipple I and Nipple II.”

The car beeped. Quested stared at his senior detective. “I’m sorry, Sir?”

Erik laughed. Retirement? _Go fuck yourself with a fistful of that cricket flour, Jean._

“Nothing. Let’s go.”

Being around Erik was difficult sometimes. Quested did his best with the blank face they taught him to wear in his academy days.

The two men walked up to the massive gate, looking for some kind of buzzer to ring. There was none and Erik could hardly see a slider, a lock, or anything that suggested the gate could be opened or closed. The whole ordeal was whiter than the KKK, but then a speaker came alive under the dead rosemary bushes.

“Police,” Erik began before the speaker could. “We’re here to speak to Mr. Sebastian Shaw.”

“You’re speaking to him.”

Erik and Quested exchanged a look.

“It’s about your son, Andy Shaw,” Quested said.

The procedure was to say _we’re very sorry to inform you that your son has passed away,_ and then there would be the painfully stretched-out moment of time while the news sunk in, and then tears welling, the occasional pot being thrown across the room. But Andy’s death had been all over breaking news since the night before.

The gate opened somehow by the time Erik had snapped out of his reverie. The gut-wrenching pain hit him at the strangest of times. He could be turning on the tap or fixing the doorknob when he remembered he had a family, once, one hand in each of his, pointing out of an airplane window while Wand’s frazzled hair smacked him in the face, vibrant red, just like his when he was younger.

Erik had the sudden urge to run in and beat the shit out of Mr. Sebastian Shaw, but he knew it’d pass. _Everything passes,_ according to Dr. Moira. It was the only indisputable truth in this world.

Erik’s blood was freezing by the time they got to the front door of the Shaw mansion. There were golf cars parked by the pine trees that looked like museum installations, part and parcel of the dreary snow. It was very white indeed, this residence, and not because of the climate. Something that had to do with high society parties, Xanax in champagne, whole roasted pigs and sliced thighs.

The door opened. Manually, with limb attached to the gilded handle and a head attached to a body. It even bore a face!

“Good day, gentlemen. May I help you?”

Erik didn’t meet Quested’s gaze this time. He had his head down, burrowing in the ridiculous pink scarf wrapped around his neck. It was the fashion statement he kept in a cupboard below his desk, the one he only got out for serious cases.

It worked; Sebastian was clearly taken aback by the sight of it.

“Andy Shaw _is_ your son, isn’t he?”

Everything was happening backwards. Quested’s words were the ones Erik pulled out only at the very end of a visit, when he knew he was talking to his killer.

Sebastian stepped aside to let them in, his eyes still pinned to the scarf. When he turned away to gesture to the living room, Erik shot Quested a sharp look. _Take the opportunity._ The kid was smarter than what he gave him credit for; as Erik got into Sebastian’s stride, he lingered back, taking in every inch of the haughty chandelier and the Bengal tiger carpet, poring through the home for any sign of foul play.

“Nice tapestry,” Erik offered. This wasn’t a typical phrase from the handbook, but this wasn’t a typical murder either.

Sebastian sat diagonally across, on the most ornate of the twelve chairs furnishing the room. The only noise was the crackling of fire from some distant hearth, certainly not from the same room, maybe even speaker synthesized. Forget the Cuban holiday—Erik suspected that the last time Sebastian had stepped out of this mansion was during his teenage years, when he still had a soul. The man clearly didn’t possess one if he had so many acres to his name and no one around to try and take it from him.

It came through in the way he looked, too, though Erik didn’t like using appearances to judge whether he was talking to a killer. That tactic only worked to a certain degree, for the accidental alcohol-induced murderers and the angry spouses, the ones who frayed at the end of his questioning. Sebastian, he was different. Soft-spoken, oriental with eyes that looked a little like a Komodo dragon, but he was white all over from the gloves to his hair to the scepter—goddamn, who still brandished those around in this day and age?—like a priest, freshly christened, absconding from his sins.

Not Maple. Not yet, but Erik could see the potential.

“Would your friend like to sit as well?” Sebastian said. “So we may talk.”

Quested turned from the window he was pretending to look at. Sebastian could smell the young blood in him, a cadet who hasn’t felt the noose around his throat. Erik ought to have put Quested outside after all, where he could bitch about it to Nur and get them both discharged.

Erik could really use a smoke.

“Sit,” Erik grunted, smearing his oily palm onto his face. Quested sat.

“Now I suppose you will begin,” Sebastian sat back on his chair, the emerald eyes of his raven glittering on the scepter. “By asking me, dear Sir, why was the case of your Andy Shaw, who according to neighbors went missing some three days back, not reported? And I, gentlemen, would answer in a stuttering voice with some vague explanation that I was out of town, oh, _working,_ _you know how it is._ ”

Erik and Quested were silent.

“No. No, I won’t have this,” Sebastian hummed. His eyebrows were all the way up on his forehead now, and he wasn’t blushing with anger or heat or anything, really. He was just too white and clean for it. “You will speak to my lawyer. Good day, Sirs.”

Erik crossed his arms and leaned forward on the table. “You realize that you’re shooting yourself in the foot?”

Sebastian tapped his scepter on the ground. “Ah, but that’s the catch. I can’t walk well, you see, I have a limp.”

“Incredibly well concealed.”

“Some things are meant to be concealed.”

Sebastian wasn’t a talker. He was indeed talking a lot at the moment, with a lot more ease and vigor than Erik had reckoned he would, but the man was one for contemplation. He had contemplated a lot in the hours before they rang him up and asked to talk.

In any case, the limp was legally in his medical history. Erik had looked him up in the database. Forty-four this year, a retired stock broker with a wife who was working all the way in Japan now. The kid had been adopted from an orphanage. His limp was from a freak hockey game when the puck swung straight into his knee and his patella slipped off.

That wouldn’t do. One couldn’t simply bring a kid to a park and kill them with such a swift stroke in the heart, past the sternum and the ribs and lay him down exactly behind the bushes without catching any attention. Not with an 18th century scepter like that.

In the following silence, Sebastian’s eyes were slipping down to Erik’s scarf again.

“You like it? Was my wife’s. Can I ask you, Mr. Shaw, about your relationship with Mrs. Barnaby?”

“I told you earlier that you’ll speak to my lawyer.”

“With your son?”

“If you’ll excuse me, I have things to get on with.”

“Things, what things? Your son is dead, Mr. Shaw, he was killed with a knife that matches that used in the double murder of Magda Kowal and Wanda Lehnsherr when they were staked on the walls of St. Stanislaus, left overnight, and removed from the walls in the early dawn of Christmas Eve. Andy Shaw was not killed in this manner, but he was still killed, and now he is in a morgue you seem to have no intention in visiting, so tell me again that you wish to see your _fucking_ lawyer.”

Spittle was flying and he was seeing red all over Sebastian’s white, white face. He didn’t realize he was standing now, a fistful of Sebastian’s shirt in his hand, Quested standing between them. His knuckles throbbed. He’d knocked something onto the ground and it was still rolling, rolling and rolling away from them.

Sebastian’s face sagged for an instant. He looked a lot more like a common house lizard, the kind of pest people killed with 3-in-1 sprays. But then it was back to its frigid silence. Sebastian wasn’t a talker.

Just then something vibrated. A screen on the living room wall showed another vehicle had arrived, a dorky blue Cooper that looked a lot warmer than anything else in a one hundred mile radius of the estate. Blood pulsed in Erik’s ears as Sebastian tried to shake himself off of his hand.

“Detective, this isn’t a legal way to perform an interview,” Quested said. When not a single muscle in Erik’s body moved, he turned to check the person who’d arrived so it might diffuse the situation.

And that was when Erik punched.

This was the stuff Erik was made of—the violence, the rush, the impossible anger that he’d grown up with his whole life. Walking into the rice mill in his early childhood to an infestation of rats feasting on his mother’s body. Why her? Why her when it could’ve been his doped up father, the useless trash who only knew how to smile with his mouth full of black teeth and suck on chicken bones when everyone else who deserved the meal were done with them.

It had taken him raw, this incident, and he’d spent days in the winter streets when there was no business to be done in the house except to bundle up and pray for heat, watching. Watching the blue-brows with their mittens and coats that weren’t just a patchwork of scrap fabric exit a restaurant, bells chiming, all warm as they laughed and stepped into a car and zoomed off. Happy. Someone had killed his mama and they were getting away with it because _no one cares, son, you’re a poor bastard and that’s all you’ll ever be._

He was lost to it. Anger grabbed him by the throat, broiled his skin, and it wasn’t the pain so much as the incredible itch that drove him to madness. Punch after punch, he could scratch until he was just a pile of dead skin cells and it still wouldn’t be enough. He’d succeeded. He’d come to America, found a purpose and transformed into more than a poor bastard. Then Maple struck and now he was just that kid again, the one who hated everyone and everything.

Fingers dug into his skin. Someone was trying to hold him back, but it had taken a while to perceive the pain over his thick coat. Quested punched him. It was a special sort, like being hit by a WWE wrestler who you later realized was that nerd in homeroom. He might not be much of a detective over the span of his life, but the entertainment industry would welcome him.

The room was spinning, more from Erik being ripped apart from his anger than the throbbing pain in his cheek. Quested had meant for the punch to screw with his vision. He saw twos for a while, two Sebastian Shaws and two Questeds and—who was that? Some lanky woman was striding into the room, lips puckered, boobs flashing.

“That’s not appropriate for winter,” Erik said, if only to cope with the bleeding shame of losing to his compulsions like that. He was a wild animal and now they all knew. Being a wild animal in a cage was substantially more difficult than being one in the wild, where you could kill your prey and nature wouldn’t give you half a shit about it.

“Frost,” she said, and put a hand out to him. “The name’s Frost for a reason.”

It was more than exhibitionism. This woman could lure you in a bar and destroy you without getting the riding crop out. Her outfit served the same purpose as his pink scarf, and Erik wondered if he was really just that obviously a widower who was thirsting to get laid and forget all the anger.

Except he wasn’t, not really. There was only one person he wanted to lay—preferably six feet underground, with his spit on their face.

“And you are?”

Frost tilted her head back to Sebastian, who was adjusting the collar of his undershirt. “Attorney of Frost and Co. That’s my client.”

Erik gazed out of the ceiling-to-floor windows, at the Cooper that was parked by the entrance. “Very good timing.”

She smiled. “Naturally. This is going on the record, by the way.”

Erik glanced at the CCTV tucked away in one corner of the room.

“The only case this’ll help you with is his suspension.”

“I mean, good enough.”

Erik got up and brushed the dirt off his knees. Odds were against Sebastian however they wanted to frame the matter, even with the limp, once they got the search warrant. But these two were a deadly pair. Any evidence had probably been erased, even before Erik got here.

The pulsing in his blood had eased. Erik brushed the bruise on his cheek because pretending it wasn’t there was far more childish than giving it some acknowledgement.

“Well then, we’ll be leaving. I apologize for the…altercation.”

Frost laid a hand on his shoulder. “See you in court, love.”

Erik stepped aside. He scanned the room, eyes roving over a hunched Shaw and the cup of wine he’d knocked over. Frost captivated him more with his chapped lips, a patchwork of pink and peeling white that reminded him of the snake that bit when he was a kid. It happened on the fields back home, a tiny green thing that he’d smashed into smithereens with a solid brick. She’d tried to tame her serpentine lips with a smear of red, but coming over to Shaw’s was obviously an emergency.

He left the room and saw that Quested was hovering by the doorway. A torrent of snow rushed their way as they exited. And then Quested threw his head back in a fit of impossible laughter.

Erik turned off the radio as they got into Quested’s car. The Toyota’s radio had a tendency to turn on the second the engine started.

“Did you get anything?”

Quested dug in his pocket for what looked like a glove. But there was a folded picture inside that he pushed out without touching.

Erik turned away from the image. For a first-timer, Quested was showing a lot less horror than one would expect. So maybe his career wasn’t going to be a crack shot after all.

“Where’d you find it?” Erik asked. He leaned back on his seat and flexed his arms, unwinding from all the unused tension. If no one had stopped him, he could’ve gone on hitting that man until there was nothing left to trial.

“Restroom.”

Erik looked at him solidly for once. He hadn’t really acknowledged Quested even though it’d been weeks since he joined the department, nothing more than a few sidelong glances and the occasional cup (them both being married to work). The man was too pretty to be in this business, but he had one hell of a brain.

“Any evidence he’d been wanking off on it?”

“In my cellphone. But we’d have to come up with a good excuse for violating privacy. Also, you probably need a lawyer after that show.”

“All worth it,” Erik said, but he wasn’t sure. He couldn’t be out of this before he got the real Maple and snapped their head off.

Quested stowed the glove away in the front compartment of the car and drove off, sputtering across the snow-laden streets. It was only four in the afternoon but darkness was swallowing the horizon already, squeezing the last rays of sunlight out of the sky, and Erik had the fleeting thought that the first time he stepped off Polish Airlines, he’d thought this place was rather pretty.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> unedited cos im thinking that i'll quit writing forever after this fic ayy


	5. Chapter 5

Charles was curled up by the bottom floor of his flat.

It shocked him for a moment: the look on his face was so controlled, but the vibes were so neurotic he wondered how Charles hadn’t whacked his door down with a baseball bat. They had this in common, the blank façade, but at this time Erik would concede that Charles was far more proficient. It may or may not have been related to the eyebrows.

“You said you’d call.”

Pouty and spoiled and wholly out of place after the events of the day. Erik peeled his coat off and put it around Charles’s shivering body.

“You could’ve waited inside if you were so adamant.”

“The point was to prove that I was adamant.”

“You’ve proven it, then. Now get in.”

Erik had his hand on the small of Charles’s back to guide him in. When a duo of junkies stumbled out of the lift, eyes rolled to the backs of their heads, Charles kissed him on the cheek. One of them glanced at him weirdly but the other in short jeans and dreadlocks formed a _rock on_ sign with his hand and slapped his friend’s ass. Erik punched twenty-one and sighed.

“I have a very important case to deal with. I can’t have you around until after.”

“I’m around now, aren’t I?”

“Is this what Oxford does to people?”

“That might have been more of Cambridge, where I did my Ph.D. Sod them.”

Erik exhaled for a long, long time.

He took a shower to help with the wealthy-pedophile stench he’d picked up at Shaw’s. Charles was unusually well-behaved, but on second thought he’d always been fairly docile, polite even, save his incredible propensity for PDA. Back when they first met, a myriad of different girls were always getting out of his car, small or fat, cute or gorgeous, each one tickled him in some new way. He was notorious for it at the university though nobody quite minded the hallway kisses and pub dances, the crazy pictures he posted on Instagram where his daily flirtations were inscribed for time eternal.

A teenager at heart, and the charm of that shone through; Erik could see it when he was just sitting there on his floor, socks kicked off, some classic literature book on his lap. He had a weakness for the bookish types even though he could never sit through one himself. Or maybe it was because of it.

“You’re watching me.”

Erik blinked. “I suppose I wasn’t aware of that.”

He bent down to look into the tiny fridge that was far beyond use, the wires frayed with a suitable risk of electrocution. Charles had seen Erik during his better days and he appreciated that Charles hadn’t said a thing about his living conditions. But this hardly felt worse. It felt truer if anything.

Erik slammed the fridge door on his half-drank cans of red bull. There was a dubious slice of blue cheese that some client might’ve offered him a few years ago that had lost its maleficent odor. It rattled and convulsed, the last breaths of a dying man.

“I’m going out for dinner.”

Charles closed his book. “About time. I’m famished!”

The affair was a somber one in spite of the blinding yellow lanterns dangling above them. Chinese New Year would arrive early. The music booming from the stereo was chaotic, an amalgamation of cymbals and gongs that tore through any semblance of a quiet meal. Takeaway was in order; Charles was not (never, really). He made Erik sit through the noise in the way only he could.

The din of clanking utensils and waiters shrieking CAO FAN, LUO PUO GAO, words attached to vague images in his head, sunk in until it all plateaued, a dim background in Erik’s mind. Charles was slurping his noodles, his person enveloped in a sort of normalcy that skewed everything Erik had come to know him for. The professor who strut around in Calvin Klein boots and made people putty with his words and his red-mouthed smile, all of that grandeur, gone. Charles, the one in front of him, didn’t come with the titles and accolades. He lit up at the (probably unintentional) addition of a crouton in his noodle soup, eyes gleaming like a newborn pup’s.

In spite of himself, the memories accosted him. He let himself think it, the time Charles had pressed against him so that he could feel their hearts beating against each other’s, the forward nature of Charles’s expectation and the twigs crackling underfoot. A shockingly red cardinal swooping down a branch like a bloody gash; _I know you’d be willing to try_. So many years ago, the wrongness of it at the time and how it all trickled down to sallow recognition now. Nothing mattered after the two women in his life died. He could have gone three blocks down from his flat and picked up the sweet Norwegian girl—what was it, Katarina? Alannah?—and Mags would’ve been too dead to say a word of dissent.

Something hard and cold in Erik had thawed during their meal. Afterwards they began their considerably-colder walk back to his flat.

“So if you really think about it, the arguments in God Delusion are very much radical and while I shan’t reveal my opinion on the topic directly, it’s clear that the structure of his thoughts are not, for lack of a better phrase, enviably objective—“

“You were wanking next to me the other day.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just putting up what ive got. does anyone wanna read my original. it was like 25k before i gave up on it. have i ever said that i want to publish an actual book. because i want some money. like not even a lot. just for food and electricity. guess that's too much to fuckin ask for.


End file.
